Azad confident of affiliation for his faction

Patna: Former Indian cricket star and president of the Association of Bihar Cricket (ABC) Kirti Azad on Saturday expressed confidence that his association will secure affiliation from the Board of Control for Cricket in India.

"There is no association other than the one I launched recently in Bihar and whatever I am doing is only for the betterment of players and cricket in the state," Azad told reporters. On the possibility of merger of his association with the Bihar Cricket Association (BCA) headed by the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) supremo Laloo Prasad Yadav, he replied in negative. There is no question of merging the new association with BCA... Our association is not parallel to BCA and there is no competitor, he contended. Azad, however, admitted that the BCA working president and Bihar minister Abdul Bari Siddiqui had on February 9 requested him to join BCA, but he refused to oblige. He said he had requested Union ministers Nitish Kumar, Ramvilas Paswan, Shahnawaz Hussain to throw their lot behind the ABC and become patrons to promote cricket in the state. A team of BCCI's observers headed by Ratnakar Shetty and Shivlal Yadav would be visiting here soon to look into the infrastructure of the association during the Dr Rajendra Prasad Trophy tournament, which will commence from February 24. If the ABC is able to please the observers it will help in securing affiliation from BCCI, he said. PTI